Vaubanthe ObservatoryINTJ

In the last days of 1706, Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban, 73, went to collect a book that nobody had given him permission to print. By one account he met the bales of fresh sheets himself, in his own carriage.

He was France's greatest builder of fortresses. Born in 1633 into minor, hard-up Burgundian nobility, he had spent decades building the walls of France and breaking the walls of its enemies in Louis XIV's wars. Those sieges brought real suffering to the townspeople inside, and that belongs in his story too. In old age he turned the same eye on the system that paid for all those wars, and what he found troubled him more than any fortress.

The book was the Projet d'une dixme royale, the Plan for a Royal Tithe. Its long title promised one simple tax in place of a whole tangle of unfair ones, falling on no subject more than another and bringing the king a sure revenue.

To an Observatory, that is a design. It was also radical. A tax on everyone alike meant a tax on nobles and clergy who had never paid. Vauban was one of them. He had done the arithmetic, and he proposed it anyway.

He had put the plan to the king years before, and nothing had come of it. So he had it printed in secret, without his name, and some 276 copies bound. Printed first, permission asked afterward. Observatories understand that order. If you ask first and are refused, the work never exists.

In February 1707 the king's council condemned the book. In March the Paris police were ordered to seize every copy.

By one account, a police officer saw at once where the trail would lead: all the evidence would fall on Vauban. His chief, d'Argenson, replied that when it came to the king's orders, it was not their business to foresee the consequences. Vauban had spent his whole life foreseeing consequences. Now the state was moving against him, run by men who had decided not to look ahead.

By the same account, when he learned that the police were hunting his book, he was deeply grieved. He sent his valets out to gather up the remaining copies. That same evening, the fever came. His chest had troubled him for years.

Ill in his house in Paris, he sent the book to his confessor with one question: had he done anything against his conscience? He was sure of the arithmetic. What he wanted to know, at the end, was whether he had done wrong.

At dinner a day before he died, the king is said to have called him a man deeply devoted to his person and to the state. The council had condemned his book, and the police were hunting it. Both things were true at once.

Vauban died on 30 March 1707, at 73, of an inflammation of the lungs. The court memoirist Saint-Simon summed him up in a single phrase.

His book had closed with a prayer that it would be taken in the same good part in which he gave it: openly, without guile. It was taken by the police.